gpu

The Apple Thunderbolt Display is long overdue a makeover. Revealed in July 2011, the 27-inch monitor has watched generations of MacBook come and go - and, until this year at least, the Mac Pro stagnate with no compatibility whatsoever - and, despite the iMac aesthetic it originally echoed being significantly upgraded last October, still languishes with its original design. Sometimes, with Apple, you have to be patient. The company has, for the most part, a yearly refresh cycle, but the Thunderbolt Display is (in tech terms) old. Still, that arguably just gives Apple the chance to do something particularly special with the new Thunderbolt Display - so here's my wish list.

NVIDIA has officially kicked off its GeForce GTX 760 GPU, which is being offered at the budget-friendly price of $249 and harboring Kepler architecture. In gaming benchmarks, the GTX 760 beats out the previous GTX 660 across the board, in some cases quite substantially. NVIDIA hails it as offering power "dramatically" beyond the gaming consoles slated to hit shelves in the coming months.

Google's artificial neural network which taught itself to recognize cats in 2012 has been left looking like a dunce, with a new network by NVIDIA and Stanford University packing more than six times the brainpower. The new large-scale neural network uses NVIDIA's GPUs to pack in 6.5x more processing power than Google before it, but in a far smaller footprint. In fact, where Google's system relied on the combined power of 1,000 servers, NVIDIA and Stanford pieced together their alternative with just sixteen.

AMD has taken the wraps off of its 2013 A-Series "Elite" APUs for desktop, hoping to show Intel that 4th-gen Haswell won't get all the chip attention this year. Building on AMD's integrated CPU/GPU architecture, the new Elite platform consists of a cluster of new quadcore chips, ranging from the relatively power-frugal A8-6500 through to the top-spec A10-6800K running at up to 4.4GHz.

While the stylus-centric abilities NVIDIA is showing off this week at Computex were, up until now, only really available with devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note, here the Tegra 4 aims to make line width a GPU thought process. With the Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung's specialized S-Pen made - and makes - it possible to write with pressure-sensitive real-time line widths, making digital artwork enter a new age on the hand-held smartphone and tablet. NVIDIA's Tegra 4 processor aims to execute a similar set of features, only this time making the processor itself sit at the heart, making it all manufacturer-agnostic.

ARM has revealed its latest processor, the ARM Cortex-A12, packing 40-percent more performance than a Cortex-A9 but with the same power consumption and in a 30-percent smaller package. The big.LITTLE compatible A12 is a 28nm chip that can be paired with ARM's Cortex-A7 cores, driving the new, more powerful chips when processing grunt is needed, and then turning to the frugal A7's when prolonging battery life is the priority.

NVIDIA's GeForce Experience isn't a baby anymore - several months in and 2.5 million downloads since this system's introduction and eventual public beta release, this game optimizing control center will replace the company's "NVIDIA Update" system as the standard. In each driver package included with a GeForce graphics card, the GeForce Experience will be packaged, starting this week with the R320 GeForce GTX 780 launch driver.

As NVIDIA continues its journey down the gaming road with software specifics such as the GeForce Experience, so too do they continue to tweak and empower their graphics cards - like the GeForce GTX 780, for instance. This week the GTX 780 has been revealed with much of the same hardware delivered in the GeForce GTX TITAN, but with slight differences that make it just a little bit less expensive and, as NVIDIA has informed us, "more of a pure gaming focus card than TITAN."

AMD wants to knock Intel and ARM off their mobility perch in 2013, and the new Temash APU is how it expects to do it. Targeting media and performance tablets, as well as keyboard-dockable hybrids and 10- to 13-inch touchscreen ultraportable notebooks, the new A-series of Temash APUs feature Jaguar cores - boasting a 20-percent performance jump over Bobcat - for consumer Windows machines with the perky performance usually associated with an iPad.

It's all-change for AMD's APU line-up for mainstream and performance notebooks in 2013, as the company attempts to hit Intel where it hurts with chips that, bang for buck, offer more performance from less power. That's the claim, anyway, and Kabini - for the mainstream - and Richland - for the performance end - are the processors that are expected to deliver it. Among the boasts are the first ever quadcore for small-display touchscreen notebooks, and up to 72-percent of the gaming performance than Intel's comparable chips.